This is the only part of their strategy to me that I don't understand. Running unmodified iOS apps on a Mac is going to be such a terrible experience and there's no way around it. Why? Just because they can?
Shipping an unmodified iOS apps for Mac is a really easy way for developers to validate market demand. If there's enough demand, they can invest in Mac-specific improvements and hopefully grow their market share. If not, at least the cost of discovery was low.
I’m guessing mostly for the sake of absorbing the iOS games ecosystem. Especially the ones that already have game pad support.
There's a lot of great tooling for making iOS apps without using Swift or Swift UI (Flutter, ReactNative, etc). I'm a JavaScript developer, and I hate Electron apps as much as anybody. The ability to use ReactNative to compile to an iOS app that runs on the desktop opens up a LOT of possibilities for me.
Ipad apps on a mac laptop with touchscreen would be great. And some of the design changes in MacOS 11 look like they are making mac UI elements touch accessible.
also a transformer to macbook way thinkpad had their models with keyboard folding to the back also would be nice.